


a sense of scale

by skeletalparade (boythighs)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Borderlands AU, M/M, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-14 23:23:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16050692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boythighs/pseuds/skeletalparade
Summary: Laurent closes his fist and the schedule disappears, the projection of it blinking away into binary oblivion. He nods, smoothing his sleek-gold hand down his front, wiping away imaginary dust particles. In the vastness of the universe, Laurent is the prim and proper illusion of undaunting Hyperion perfection. Jack looks at him, really looks at him, and the slow curl of his lips should be unnerving, but Laurent is used to it by now.There’s blood in the water up here, and everybody knows it.





	a sense of scale

**Author's Note:**

> i know that no one is gonna care about a borderlands au, but did that stop me? no. no, it really didn't, and i loved every second of it.

The view from the top is worth the hell Laurent has put himself through to get here.

Helios is a swirling beacon of trickery and deceit in the vacuum of space, hurdling towards the inevitable heat death of the universe, but Pandora, as vulgar a planet as it is, looks goddamn gorgeous from the wide, extensive windows in Jack’s office.

“A real pretty sight, ain’t it, kiddo?” Jack’s got his hip pressed to the edge of his desk, watching his newly minted secretary take in the sight of the planet below them. Laurent can see the reflection of him in the glass, the entertained expression etched into the mask Jack keeps bolted to his face almost condescending.

Two fingertips of flesh and bone, not the prosthetic, press to the window. Laurent keeps his face neutral to hide his own mystified emotions, the curiosity of what it must be like on that hideous heap of rock.

Everyone who has ever had the misfortune of being down there has always talked about how awful it is on Pandora, but Laurent wishes he could know for himself.

One day, he _will_ know; he’s going down there the first chance he gets. To find his brother. Auguste may have gone down and never come back, but no one simply vanishes into thin air without a trace. It just doesn’t _happen._

Laurent swallows past the lump in his throat and looks back at Jack, refusing to betray his thoughts, his feelings. He hasn’t kicked and scratched and _stabbed_ his way up the ranks of Hyperion by being soft, and he won’t start here.

“Not very.”

Jack’s laugh is a ricochet through the office, going, and going, and going.

 

**x.**

 

“Let me rephrase the question, since you didn’t seem to quite _get_ _it_ the first time.”

Laurent’s fingers do not stall for even a second on the keyboard as the scene plays out in the office across from his desk, door ajar just enough that he can hear everything going on inside.

“Where. Are. The. Reports.”

A business deal on Eden 4 has gone miserably awry, and the person in charge of overseeing it, a scrawny, mousy thing of a man, has failed to do his job in a way that Jack believes is contingent to his plans. It will be his funeral, Laurent thinks, brows raising daintily as he listens to the stammered-out apologies the man is making – it would have been better for him to just stay quiet. Too bad.

“No, no, no, pal, I wasn’t asking for your goddamn _excuses._ I was asking for my _reports,_ which you don’t _have,_ and you already made me ask twice. _Twice.”_ Laurent can imagine Jack the way he is right now, eyes deranged with vicious heat, scowl setting the mask, body rigid with tension. With anger. The path of his tongue over his lower lip as he says, “We’re done here.”

It’s a normal day. Jack presses the button hidden on his desk, and the trap-door opens, swallows the man and his screaming, pleading words whole, and then there are a whole bunch of sounds that Laurent tries not to think too hard about. He pulls up Jack’s schedule on his cybernetic, projecting it into the open air as he rises and strolls into Jack’s office, nudging the door closed – properly, this time – behind him.

“Sir.” He says, approaching the desk with innate decorum, cocking his hip out to the side as he drinks in the sight of Jack’s hand pushed into his hair, eyes tight behind the glasses he wears when he’s alone. He hardly grunts an acknowledgement at Laurent.

“You have a 3 o’clock meeting,” Laurent begins, cutting of haltingly as Jack waves his free hand.

“Cancel it.” He says, almost like an afterthought, eyes focused on the forms he’s reading over. Laurent clears his throat to garner the full attention of his boss, who is frazzled beyond belief, but looks up with mismatched eyes despite it, seeing Laurent like he hadn’t even really noticed him to start with. He doesn’t so much steamroll over Jack’s words as choose to ignore them.

“The meeting is with the ATLAS reps, sir.”

Jack blinks owlishly, a wash of remembrance dawning on him suddenly. It speaks to how much pressure he must be under, Laurent thinks, that he forgot about the single most important meeting on this side of the galaxy. Hyperion and ATLAS working together in any way, shape, or form has been unheard of since Laurent first argued his way into a job here. Probably before, too, when Auguste had been here as a Middle Manager.

“Fuck.” Leaning back in his chair, Jack tears his glasses off, tosses them onto his desk where they slide over paperwork, and rakes his hands down the length of his face. Several times. “Don’t cancel that. I need those assholes up here, so I can get inside their heads. Then crush them under my skag-skins. Slowly. With great pleasure.”

Laurent closes his fist and the schedule disappears, the projection of it blinking away into binary oblivion. He nods, smoothing his sleek-gold hand down his front, wiping away imaginary dust particles. In the vastness of the universe, Laurent is the prim and proper illusion of undaunting Hyperion perfection. Jack looks at him, really looks at him, and the slow curl of his lips should be unnerving, but Laurent is used to it by now.

There’s blood in the water up here, and everybody knows it.

“What would I do without you?” Jack asks, mostly rhetorical. The fold of Laurent’s arms over the small of his back is measured, calculated, as is the facsimile of a smile on his face in return. He doesn’t bother dignifying a response. Jack can surmise the veracity of his inquiry on his own.

 

**x.**

 

The representatives that ATLAS sends up are, for their part, two of their best. Or so Laurent would assume. They come by a quarter til, led up by a pair of guards that Laurent himself buzzes in to the foyer outside of Jack’s office. Two behemoths disguised as men, ruggishly Pandoran from their dark skin to their tacky, horrendously offensive suits. Dark green, like the canopies of trees that Laurent has only seen depicted in photographs.

“ATLAS, I presume.” Laurent looks at them over the monitor of his computer as they walk in, the guards giving the secretary a perfunctory nod before the elevator doors obscure them from sight.

One of the two men nods, the bulkier of them, though not by much. Laurent will admit, begrudgingly, that he is… attractive. Muscular, broad-shouldered, tall, a handsome smile diffusing across his features like an infectious disease. The power in his eyes makes Laurent shiver minutely, repressed to keep up an air of dignity and repose.

“Yeah, that’s us.” The awestruck note in his voice resonates deeply in his words, and Laurent gets it, he does. He was very much the same when he first stepped foot on Helios, years and years ago, when he had been a dewy-eyed young man chasing the ghost of his brother down halls too long, too wide. Against his character, Laurent smiles at the man, small and private, and _nothing_ to do with how gorgeous the man is. Behind the man’s shoulder, his companion stifles a groan. Laurent hears it but ignores it willingly.

“Jack is waiting on you in his office.” Laurent gets to his feet, tugging at the hem of his dark blue waistcoat to pull it back into place. He walks them to the door and doesn’t bother knocking, leading them into the office where Jack is standing at the window, back turned to the three of them as they enter. A power-play.

Feign disinterest, pretend you don’t care about the competition; plant the seeds of superiority into their brains and they will grow and fester and manifest themselves with time. Deception has a particularly acrid scent, and Laurent recognizes it well.

He did, after all, learn from the best.

The ATLAS pair spends hours in Jack’s office. Laurent leaves them alone and tells himself that he isn’t curious why it takes so long, but the fact of the matter is that Laurent had expected Jack to laugh at them and their fancy ideas of peacemaking, send them packing and never speak of it again, _not_ to spend an entire afternoon and a portion of the evening negotiating terms. When they emerge from the office, they both look harried, and Laurent knows that look well, too – Jack tends to have a very specific effect on people.

It isn’t necessary for them to come back by Laurent’s desk; he’s already preparing his things to leave for the night, so when they approach – well, it’s just the one of them, the one from earlier who had looked enchanted by everything – Laurent is surprised by the clearing of his throat. He pauses in putting his folders away, eyes flickering up to the hulking man the desk separates him from.

“Hi, sorry to bother you – I just wanted to say, uh, thanks for… helping us?” It’s a flimsy excuse to talk to him, Laurent’s eyebrows hitching up. He seems to take this as permission to keep talking. “I’m Damen, by the way. My friend’s name is Nikandros. I figured I’d go ahead and introduce myself. With how things went today, you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of us.”

Laurent doesn’t know what lies Jack spoon fed them, and he feels surprisingly bad for them. In the long run, Jack’s plans are simple: take ATLAS out of the equation, bestow glory upon Pandora. That’s a lie, too, of course. Laurent has been a player in the game long enough now that he knows what “bestowing glory” really means – seeing Pandora go up in flames, laughing in the wreckage of it like some sort of hero, some sort of victor.

It is difficult to present a smile as anything less than pitying, but Damen and Nikandros do not know him the way the rest of Hyperion does, so they do not recognize it as anything but friendly.

Damen raps his knuckles on Laurent’s desk, what may be a sheepish look on his face. Laurent doesn’t know for sure. He likely never will. Still, Damen turns to go, and Laurent, willed by the universe, reaches out with his cybernetic hand to curl synthetic fingers around a very real, very firm wrist. Damen looks back at him with lines of shock clear on his face, and Laurent clears his own throat before yielding his grip.

“Laurent. My name is Laurent.” It seems only _fair_ to return the favor in their exchange of names and niceties.

A million-watt smile splits Damen’s face wide open, two neat, shiny white rows of flawless teeth cracked apart as he laughs, pleased as punch. Cat got the canary, not a man stepping foot into a pit of vipers. How has he ever made it this far in the world of corporate animosity and ferocity, Laurent wonders idly?

The elevator door pings. The guards have returned to take Damen and Nikandros back downstairs.

“Well, see you around then, Laurent.”

Damen raises a departing hand as he and his friend strut back over to the elevator, flanked by Jack’s highest paid guards, and Laurent hardly realizes he’s smiling until the doors have closed, and the men have disappeared. Gone, just like that.

It’s strange, but they hadn’t seemed like the crazed, psychotic fends that everyone claims all Pandorans are.

“You can’t trust Pandora, kid.” Jack’s voice is a distant chime behind him, as if he has read Laurent’s mind, emerging from his office with his hands in his pockets and his eyes fixed doggedly on his secretary. His gaze burns the back of Laurent’s neck like a spider bite, slow-acting poison. Laurent’s nod is numb.

You can’t trust Pandora.

You can’t trust, period.

 

**x.**

 

Jack dies.

The whole space station is stunned – and then, in the wake of surprise, chaos ensues. Every office is another trap of schemes, every single code monkey on Helios trying to buy their way into the throne, dying for a taste of power.

Laurent, though, doesn’t need to buy anything. All he has to do is move his things into Jack’s old office and take what is rightfully his now that Jack is gone. Months, a near year spent working under him, learning how to orchestrate and pull the strings, the puppetry Jack had performed a natural proclivity for Laurent. The ostentatious yellow chair feels much more comfortable than his old one, beaten up and frayed at the edges even before he had claimed it.

People try to topple him from his fresh position, but Laurent, ever clever, thwarts every attempt until they stop, recognizing that where the few have doubted him, the many still have no way of standing against him; he is more established, more treacherous, more cunning, and more willing to spill blood if it means that he gets what he wants. Hyperion is his. Helios – it’s all _his._

The first thing he does is pull up the ATLAS contact on his echo-eye.

Auguste needs him.

**Author's Note:**

> party at my place [(twitter).](https://twitter.com/occultened)


End file.
